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Table 1 Archetype A

From: Balancing exploration and exploitation in transferring research into practice: a comparison of five knowledge translation entity archetypes

KT archetype & organizing logic

Explorative dimension

Exploitative dimension

Strengths

Leadership challenges

Archetype A

Research governance maintained by academics yet they are accountable to a wider group of stakeholders; this can increase researcher absorptive capacity of service provider values and concerns.

Exploitation supported by seeking to shift the culture of research to integrate broader set of perspectives and stakeholders.

Increased stakeholder involvement enables integration of perspectives, thus suited to researching complex multidimensional problems.

Complexity of research and integration of (shifting) stakeholder agendas can increase the time needed to generate research outputs.

Multi-stakeholder research to engage a wide range of perspectives

High exploratory focus maintains academic autonomy.

Wider research engagement enables research to be more relevant to users and increases their absorptive capacity, being more aware of research process.

Research includes the KT process, which may be done from multiple perspectives.

Brokering and negotiation needed across multiple stakeholder groups.

Wider research agenda promotes research into implementation processes from multiple perspectives.

Engaging practitioners and health service providers in research increases their level of ownership, supporting the implementation of research findings; yet implementation process not formally controlled.

New culture of inclusive and multidisciplinary research can generate wider genre of research, beyond medical paradigm.

Risk of alienation and retreat to institutionalized silos of activity if boundaries are not actively managed, rather than sustaining new culture of multi-stakeholder research.